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The Distant Sound

Gert Jonke

Translated by Jean M. Snook

A composer who has already given up composing – because of his inability to notate the music of the spheres – becomes increasingly fixated on capturing a mysterious, eerie, distant sound, which he soon equates with all the things he desires most: the perfect woman, the perfect city, the perfect work of art. Obsessed with his impossible quest, the man breaks out of the asylum and begins a series of comic, dreamlike, and ultimately haunting adventures as he tries to locate the source of the sound that consumes him . . . and instead finds the root cause of all his failures.